Car-Free Bedford

Emil Choski was sick and tired of the trucks and the exhaust on Bedford Avenue and, rather than sit back and take it like so many of his peers, the 22-year-old artist set out to propose something rather dramatic.

"A lot of people in New York are very pro-car," he said with a smirk as slight as his Polish accent. "But things always change."

His plan, entitled "Car-Free Bedford," is deceptively simple. Ban all traffic on Bedford from Metropolitan Avenue to McCarren Park, roughly 10 blocks worth of the popular drag in Williamsburg. Turn it into a pedestrian esplanade. Invite restaurants and cafes to open sidewalk cafes. Plant fertile patches of grass and trees in the middle of the road. Replace concrete with cobblestones and gutters with bike lanes.

Watch as residents' lives slowly improve, as businesses reap the rewards of increased foot traffic and as the community becomes livelier. The bottom line, Choski said, is that trees and flowers don't kill people, traffic does.

In this very early stage of the project-Choski is still collecting support from local businesses and community leaders, many of whom have expressed interest in his unorthodox idea-his main obstacle may be history itself. Of the hundreds of pedestrian malls that opened in North America during the 1960s and 1970s, only around 30 remain vital, according to experts at the American Planning Association.

However, Choski need look no further for inspiration than across the East River to Manhattan, where the movement to reclaim some streets for pedestrians may be gaining ground, inch by inch.

Choski has the quiet intensity of most young artists. His long, lean face is framed by shoulder length, coffee-colored hair. Sitting at an outdoor café on Bedford and North Fifth Street recently, he described his project in an even, monotone voice, as if he were delivering a college lecture.

But he is also savvy. The sleek and professional Car-Free Bedford website earned Choski some free publicity in a number of popular blogs and on the local TV news.

"During the summer, there are so many people down here, they're spilling out into the street," he explained. "The trucks are loud and they're an eyesore." He blinked his eyes in the bright sunlight. "It ruins the character of the neighborhood."

While today Williamsburg is a study in gentrification, decades ago the neighborhood was characterized by manufacturing and light industry, with only a hint of the artist and hipster invasion that was soon to come. Around the mid-1990s, rent prices began to soar, and in 2005, the waterfront was rezoned for residential use, allowing big-name development companies to start parceling out blocks of land for shimmering luxury condos.

On any given day, the sidewalks of Bedford pulse with activity-delivery guys pushing hand-trucks, fashionable parents pushing strollers and would-be-writers pushing pens at outdoor cafes, hoping to produce the next great novel. Cars, trucks and buses jockey for street space with bikers and pedestrians. On the weekends, when hundreds of young fashionistas flock to Williamsburg to pack its dive bars and closet-sized music clubs, Bedford reaches a dangerous level of density.

"Look, this area is already gentrified," Choski said. "There's no stopping it. I just don't want to see chain stores go up all over the place." Choski has an undisguised hatred of chain stores. His former apartment on Bedford and North Sixth is now a Subway sandwich shop.

"Bedford has the feel of a small town," he said between sips of a large coffee. "And closing the street down could help businesses so they can stay open rather than be priced out."

Choski has reached out to local community leaders in an effort to shore up support for his project. "In theory I think it's a very interesting idea," said Teresa Toro, chair of the transportation committee for Community Board 1. "But I don't know if Bedford is the place to do it," she added.

Toro, who is also the New York coordinator for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an anti-sprawl non-profit, is trying to commission a study to assess the impact of Choski's plan on local businesses. "I haven't heard a whole lot of excitement in the community," she admitted. Choski's idea may have to be scaled down or moved to the waterfront, where most of the major development in Williamsburg is currently taking place, Toro said.

Some neighborhood business owners and residents expressed enthusiasm about the plan, but most question its plausibility.

Joseph, the owner of Vittoria Bakery on Bedford and North Eighth, would prefer the street to remain open on weekdays to allow deliveries, but said he wouldn't mind if it were closed on weekends. "There's hardly any foot traffic on the weekdays," said Joseph, who declined to give his last name. "Truck drivers come in and get pastries in the morning. It would hurt my business to ban cars."

The objections of a lone baker, however, may be the least of Choski's worries.

In the 1960s and early '70s, many mid-sized cities in the United States experimented with converting streets into pedestrian malls. In 1959, Kalamazoo, Michigan, became one of the first cities to close down a downtown street to automobiles, turning two blocks of Burdick Avenue into a pedestrian mall. The initial fanfare sparked a flurry of copycat projects, and at its height, some 200 cities across the country had pedestrian malls.

In the mid-1990s, however, the grand experiment began to unravel. Kalamazoo re-opened Burdick to vehicular traffic in 1997. According to Greg Flisram of the American Planning Association, the mall had become an anachronism, "a tired piece of urban design fashion whose novelty had long worn thin." Today, only about 30 of the original 200 pedestrian malls remain closed to traffic.

Choski dismisses the North American model, preferring to reap his inspiration from the progenitors of pedestrian streets: Europe and South America. "People always bring up the failures of earlier pedestrian malls," he said. "Back then, they were trying to revive downtown streets and it didn't work out." With its vibrant nightlife and diverse community, Bedford needs no more vitality, Choski said. "I'm trying to add to what it already has. You can see that in streets in Europe."

Stone Street in Lower Manhattan could also serve as a potential model for what Bedford could be, Choski said. A narrow cobblestoned street first developed by Dutch colonialists in the 1600s, Stone Street was closed to cars and trucks in the mid-1990s, and has since flourished as a popular spot for dining and shopping.

Choski wonders, if it works in the Financial District, why not Williamsburg? Why not Bedford? The sun glinted off the cars parked along the street, and the question was left hanging in the air, unanswered.